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About Me

I live and blog in Ann Arbor, Michigan. University of Michigan BA and MA from Eastern Michigan University. One term in the Michigan Army National Guard. The Institute of Land Warfare, Army magazine, Infantry Magazine, Military Review, Naval Institute Proceedings, and Joint Force Quarterly have published my occasional articles. See "Published Works" on the web version for citations.

The Undead Archives

My undead archives pre-Blogger were actually restored to life after Geocities sites went dark. Start at the old home page here.
If you find a link to the old site on the current site or old site, you should be able to replace the "g" in "geocities" with an "r" and make a good link.
Another archived site is here.
It replaces the ".com" with ".ws".
I hope to move all the older archives here (and started that project) but it is really tedious.

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Seas for Our Time?

America joining the Law of the Sea treaty (LOST) would have zero impact on China's claims at sea. Why pretend it would?

Sometime in the next several weeks, an international tribunal in The Hague will announce its long-awaited ruling on a territorial dispute in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines. The court is expected to rule at least partially in favor of Manila.

China already has said it will ignore the ruling of the tribunal, which it claims is biased.

If China does disregard the decision, the United States almost certainly will portray the case as yet another instance in which Beijing flouts international law. But any U.S. attempt to pressure China over its rejection of the ruling will be complicated by the fact that Washington itself has not ratified the treaty on which the Philippine complaint is based — the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, or UNCLOS.

A U.S. Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft flying Tuesday in international airspace over the East China Sea was intercepted in an "unsafe manner" by a Chinese J-10 fighter jet, several defense officials tell CNN.

The Chinese jet was never closer than 100 feet to the U.S. aircraft, but it flew with a "high rate of speed as it closed in" on the U.S. aircraft, one official said.

The Chinese want to drive us from the region--which they assert is not international airspace--by force. If China can intimidate us, the rest of the region has no chance of resisting China for long.

Remember, China isn't relying on the Law of the Sea treaty for its claim on the South China Sea (well, 80% of it), which Peking says is based on "traditional" Chinese claims rather than international law.

Expansion of Chinese power, particularly China's military power, and North Korean belligerency are the precipitate causes for the emerging Asian security network. In the late 1990s, Southeast Asian nations began reacting to Chinese territorial expansion in the South China Sea. Chinese maritime and island claims encroached on Vietnamese and Filipino territory. Hanoi and Manila faced a common security threat.

Beijing's audacious island manufacturing strategy in the South China Sea has provoked fierce Vietnamese and Filipino resistance. China creates artificial islands then says they are Chinese territory. The larger pseudo-islets now have air bases capable of handling jet fighter-bombers.

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Note on site statistics: When I strip out the junk hits from Blogger statistics that seem to come and go in waves, I appear to have about 10,000 hits per month.

My old statistics package, Site Meter, seems to miss a lot and even disappears visits after they've appeared.

I just added a new StatCounter. So far it shows far fewer hits than Blogger and is more in line with Site Meter. But I suspect neither of the non-Blogger statistics register hits from social media. So I'm not sure what my audience size is. It is puzzling to me.

Of course, it is quite possible that my failure to use Facebook and Twitter has handicapped me in getting an audience. Or it may be an additional issue. I may be a blogosaur!